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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tetravys" data-source="post: 4801252" data-attributes="member: 83846">hi everybody,It's coming up on a year since we started playing 4e, and I've been leading four intrepid adventurers through the chaos that is Thunderspire Labyrinth (which, if you've played it, contains far more labyrinths than it does thunder or spires).  While there have been a lot of great improvements to the game in 4e, there have been some drawbacks as well.  For us in particular, we've got two major hurdles we're trying to overcome.Firstly, as you already know, three out of the four PCs are strikers.  The rundown is ranger, ranger, rogue, fighter.  And as you might imagine, their per-round damage output is nothing short of phenomenal.  Essentially the fighter ties up the big monsters with marks, and the strikers take care of the rest.  Things regain a semblance of balance when the encounter includes monsters that aren't easily moved or monsters with heavy-hitting ranged attacks, but about 75% of the encounters so far in Thunderspire have been bloodlettings.Over the last few sessions, I've tried some tricks to bring things back into line.  I've begun using Stealth checks more frequently (which a surprising number of monsters in Thunderspire are trained in) to regain some maneuverability, and in some cases I've completely ignored the fighter to go after the softer targets.The other difficulty is that each combat takes about an hour.  Having consulted with other groups, it seems that's how 4e is designed.  For our party, however, we're trying to get it down to about 30 minutes per combat.One house rule I've tried is halving the monsters' hit points and doubling their damage.  It works well for the most part, as most of the supporting monsters end up being more useful, and the stronger ones can actually begin to force healing surges and daily powers from the PCs.  It's not perfect - sometimes it's difficult to determine whether it would unbalance a given encounter.  On a few occassions I've had to nix it, for example if it would reduce an important NPC enemy to 40 hp or somesuch.And that's about it...I'm hoping someone out there might be able to shed some light on this.  At the very least, we're coming to the close of Thunderspire soon.  I've suggested to my players that it might be a good time to think about new characters, hopefully with new classes.  Thanks in advance for everyone's advice, at this point I'm willing to give anything a shot!</blockquote>

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